Reset - Prelude

When the lights went out that bitterly cold Christmas Eve, it was the end of life as I knew it. In an instant decades of living oblivious to the world around me slipped into the frigid abyss of what came to be known as the reset. It was months before I learned what really happened. Tens of thousands died in the bitter cold that first winter, many starved and even more were brutally murdered by the marauders canvassing the vast expanse of desolation. Searching for food, weapons and women. These human hyenas stripped the spirit from the populace while hunger riots and nightmarish savagery swept through city centers. The lust for blood left hope and love cringing in the corner like whipped whimpering dogs.

The separatists pulled the plug on the world, sending it and every human on the planet into chaos. I think history will describe the dark ages as enlightened when compared to those first few months. Everything stopped. The machines, the systems, the computers. Everything I took for granted sat frozen, impotent and motionless like metallic skeletons out of some macabre dream. Electricity, now nothing more than a myth. The miracle that once powered the world was gone and with it, every contrivance and convenience known to man. Unprepared, civilization is dying a slow unceremonious death.

News was slow in coming, but what little trickled down through my beleaguered static filled wireless. I learned the first suicide attacks targeted the great super powers. It’s insane to think that those who once controlled the planet were destroyed by zealots comprised mostly of disenchanted elite’s. The separatists released Xerfrin gas in the capital structures of Washington D.C. & Moscow. They did it the old fashioned way after decades of infiltrating their minions into the highest levels of government. They simply walked it in. Once loose, the tasteless, odorless gas wafted across the unsuspecting countryside smothering out communities like a plastic wrap stretched across a baby’s face. Comparatively the influenza pandemic was a day at the beach when aligned to this devil spawned giver of death.

Banned, Xerfrin was supposed to be non-existent. Destroyed by the lunatics that created it. Obviously that little untruth killed millions. Xerfrin, is a nasty derivative of Sarin, a sort of bewitched red-haired third cousin which incorporated within its genesis the bio-agent Rebola, making it devastatingly lethal. Dredged from the gaping holes of hell this devils brew efficiently killed and maimed indiscriminately. The first victims died nearly instantly as their internal organs turned to jelly and their lungs exploded from pleurisy. Their eyes and skin melted away like plastic cups in a microwave as their nervous systems short circuited. This aerosolized minister of destruction killed with minimal contact. Though painful, mercifully it murdered those fortunate ones quickly. Minutes versus days. Though I didn’t see the effects personally, the few survivors I’ve met described a horror that seemed unearthly, they called in biblical.

They were the lucky ones. Those who tried to help them, the Samaritans, heroes unwittingly exposed themselves to Xerfrin’s godless twin Rebola. Virulent and highly contagious, this level 5 contagion took out most of the east coast in days. The first symptoms were flulike allowing the virus to multiply and live long enough to spread. Bred to be adaptable, Rebola killed at a molecular level twice as fast as Ebola, but with a unique manic twist, it caused total blindness by attacking the optical nerves. Really, who thinks this stuff up? What kind of disturbed psychopath sat in a lab and designed a bug like this. Did they sit in their little cubicles, in their blue spaceman like bio-hazard suits and say, “Hey Doctor whoever, what do you think about engineering our little child so it will make people go blind too. That way no one can help one another?” The good part is I think they were killed by their own creation. Justice.

Luckily for those west of the Mississippi, Rebola was too good at what it was designed to do. It killed too fast. Designed to be transmitted by contact, the loss of mass transit exterminated it before it could eviscerate the continent.

Rumors say stolen tactical nuclear weapons had been secreted into most of the world’s financial, religious centers. New York, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, Tehran, Riyadh, Jerusalem, Rome. All Gone.

In a single instant the choreographed ballet of destruction, continued the reset on man. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, a dozen flashes of brilliant light, searing heat and blast craters the size of cities sent the technology that wove the world together into oblivion. Hundreds of millions turned to ash, dust in the wind to pollute what and who remained. I can only assume the firestorms and fallout that followed left huge swathes of Eurasia and Africa desolate. Nothing is coming from the hot zones. I would think those who try to venture into the desolated areas don’t return.

Sporadic news comes fleetingly across the wireless. Reception is never good and blackouts for weeks are the norm. Who knows what damage the planet is reeling from. I see shooting stars quite frequently now. Probably satellites falling back to earth. Only heaven knows what the poor souls on the space stations must be thinking watching their beautiful blue planet destroy itself. I wonder if there was time to send them one last transmission, a quick cry for help before the world went dark. In truth it doesn’t really matter, I guess it won’t be long before they too will fall. Burning up, like a surreal comet scorching across the sky. A spiraling death plunge toward the world they left behind.

All these years later, it amazes me to think that the separatists with all their fanatic zeal went undetected for the decades it took to plan and implement the reset. I’m talking about drink the Kool-Aid, Rev. Jim Jones crazy.

How do you teach mass suicide for the greater good? These were rich, well educated, privileged people in the highest positions in society. Vetted by every standard of the common good. Yet united these few thousand obtained the materials and created the logistics necessary to send the world back to the stone age.

I don’t know how many of them survived and from what I can tell they had no desire to rule. They sought neither fame or adulation, they just wanted change. Sudden irreversible change.

Well they had achieved that. The gut shot came as the second wave of attacks targeted electrical power generation plants and substations across the globe. Painstakingly planned, precisely placed EMP devices discharged with devastating ferocity disabling the power grid and destroying the planets ability to create electricity. In the US, nuclear plants were spared for a short time, but the victory was short lived as the separatist’s brainwashed legion took out each facility with the surgical precision of a laser guided strike. Once again the infiltration into the very fabric of the country’s infrastructure was exploited and the ultimate price was paid by those who lost their lives to fallout and radiation sickness.

As the lights flickered into a stale dank darkness the last television broadcast seen by the human race simply said, “Don’t go quietly into the night!”

Those who survived migrated away from the larger cities where food became the only currency that mattered. Local governments couldn’t control the fear which turned to panic and then to rage. Control was lost and the protectors in many cases became the tyrants and tormentors. They had the guns, so they took the food. Sex was also a commodity and female flesh was peddled for a bit of bread or a trivial slice of meat.

The collapse was complete. Change had been forced on all of us. Change for what? Too what? This? A blackened world ripped apart by the basest desires of men. God help us!

“Dad, Dad, do you see the smoke?’ I didn’t hear him lost in the overshadowing melancholy of my thoughts. Impatient he roughly shook me, pulling me away from my waking nightmare. “Slade, do you see the smoke, is it coming from our valley?” We hadn’t been gone a half a day and the smoke rising over the ridge was foreboding. We left the girls alone while we went to hunt. The pit of my stomach knotted up, I felt something was wrong. We left our gear on the ground and saddled up, whipping the horses into a frenzied pace, we raced toward the smoke filled sky. It looked to be home, as we drew closer the cold night was beginning to fall and we finally saw the brazen embers rising from the cabin.

“Dakota, wait. Let me go first,” I couldn’t stop him. He sprinted from place to place bellowing his mother's and sister’s names. He ran past the funeral pyre that was once our home. “Oh, God NO!” he’d discovered the burned ravaged bodies of his mother and kid sister. From his shattered heart came a primal scream, tears flushed the sides of face. Lovingly he squatted down and scooped up his sister and rocked her limp lifeless body in his arms. His body shuttering and quivering. As he looked up, I saw it. I saw the fire of agony and despair in his eyes.

I watched wordlessly, unable to speak or move as he parted his beloved sisters blood soaked hair. Using his tears, he tried to clean her battered face with the well-worn bandana she’d given him so many years before. It was if time stood still. What seemed like seconds was an hour and now fully dark with a guttural moan, he laid little Jasmine softly on the grass, spun about and strode for his horse. Determined, manic, angry. I begged him to wait. “We will gather the men and search for the clan together.” My pleas fell on deaf ears. His mind already racing through the mountain scape in search of any place the murderers could hide. In a flash he was gone. The glint of “Sossie’s” hooves and clods of dirty snow arched skyward as he galloped toward revenge. 

His departure welled my deepest fear for him, grief ripped the marrow of my heart. I couldn’t follow. I couldn’t lose him too, but I couldn’t leave these precious bodies for the wolves and vermin to desecrate.

Broken and lost I buried my wife and child in the frozen ground. Numb to everything but the visage of fate that brought me to this moment. Hollowed to the core. I lamented for the women I loved.

Such sweet tender creatures whose lives were ended because there is no law or justice. Just anarchy steeped in Godless desire. It has to stop. Choking on my tears I’m unhinged by their lifeless eyes staring up at me from the shallow abyss of a grave barely deep enough to protect their precious flesh. The ground, harder than the granite cliffs that once gave us shelter and as unyielding as the men who tore them from me. My tears do nothing to soften the icy petrified dirt. Unremorseful it swallows up the blood from my hands as I pommel it, striking in torment time and time again. Relentlessly my mind’s eye forces me to relive the senseless vision of their soft auburn hair, knotted in blood, their angelic faces broken and torn. I feel the fear and despair etched in their countenances.

Ravaged by gutless men hell bent on personal gratification and greed. They died alone. Marauders from the Chelsea clan extinguished the only thing bringing light and hope into my dark world. They stole my sweet Sarah and my precious little Jasmine. We’d found peace and sanctuary. We’d built a life from the ashes. We wanted only for peace and to be left alone. The blood dripping from my broken hands can never ease the agony of my soul, but I knew, one day, the lifeless body of Ephraim Chelsea would begin to pay the debt.